Welding Tips and Tricks

With the help of this forum, I turned my tractor bucket into an SSQA attachment. Sadly, while doing this, I noticed a huge leak coming from the steering, so I am removing the steering cylinder for repair.

Of course, Kubota provided really bad instructions in the workshop manual and made a relatively easy job a real puzzle, but I finally got access to the fasteners I needed to remove by taking out the battery and the platform it sits on.

Not surprisingly, the platform had had problems under the previous owner, so it was somewhat corroded. It has nuts welded to it, and one rusted solid to the bolt going through it, so I had to drill the nut out.

I am thinking I should replace the bolts and cheap nuts with stainless now that I'm fixing up the platform. My thinking is that stainless might resist corrosion well enough to make it easier to remove the platform if it ever has to come off again.

So, what happens if I tack stainless nuts to a carbon steel platform? Is there some kind of evil thing that happens that I don't know about? I have some stainless wire somewhere, although I don't know if it matters for tacks.

Good idea, also use anti-seize on the stainless bolts.
When tacking the nuts, if you don't have 309 wire, use whatever stainless wire you have. Don't use er70 wire.

Make sure to paint/coat the area after the repair as otherwise the more 'noble' stainless nut will start to create a corrosion ring around it on the mild steel if water gets involved. The steel plate basically starts to rust/corrode faster because of the contact with the stainless steel if it's allowed to get wet.

Like mentioned above, using an ainti-seize or grease on the threads with stainless-on-stainless fasteners is important as otherwise it will gall and seize too. (and you'd be abck to square one )

Bye, Arno.

Thanks for the help.

I do plan to paint the platform. I used a grinder, electrolysis, and my kitchen dishwasher to get it reasonably clean and free of rust, and I'm planning to prime over the existing paint and bare spots and cover it with Herculiner.

In practical terms, no nothing terrible is going to happen, your nuts probably won't strictly be stainless anymore if they're allowed to overheat and if you use er70 series wire the weld is going to be prone to corrosion but there's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with welding carbon to stainless particularly if you use a wire made for it like ER309, I've tig welded carbon to carbon and carbon to stainless with ER309 countless times and it's always passed being bent just as well as anything else.

As coldman says, if you don't have 309, just use whatever stainless wire you have over using er70 wire, ER308 is recommended for stainless to stainless only, but it's unlikely the reduction in strength will make any difference.

Hi mate, trust me dont bother with stainless, the nuts on that thing are probable original. Just replace them use never seize and dont dukka dukka dukka the hell out of them with a rattle gun. Plain steel will be fine, I do this alll the time to much bigger gear and have never had an issue, in fact staino hardware comes with its own expense and issues and only are used in known corrisive environments and pumps, chemical contact or some electrical fittings.